The place of digital threats in the modern human security concept

In 2022 the concept of human security that had emerged and had been evolving since 1994 was transformed in the domain of prioritized threats. Digital threats were identified as a high-priority group of threats, despite the fact that neither the UN Resolution 66/290 nor the Secretary General’s special report on the human security mentioned this factor as menacing in 2012-2013. The given change raises a research issue of its theoretical and political reasons. The accent on both of these dimensions distinguishes the given work from other academic papers that analyze evolution of the human security, but ignore novel digital factors as well as the influence of fluctuating theoretical category of threats in international relations. The paper concludes that digital threats reached the priority place in the modern concept of human security because of theoretical transformation, determined by gradual reconfiguration of the threat category that moved from systemic to state-centered one. As a result, to reconceptualize the human security, the UN bureaucracy and academics needed to structure a large number of new threats and highlight the main ones, to focus on those threats that would be of particular importance for states, did not come from the environment as a whole, but from the actions or inaction of malicious actors and with which the world community would have the tools to fight. In the modern human security concept, digital threats are seen in this lens. The vision was also formed by the design of instruments to counter digital threats at the UN level, their acquisition of military-strategic importance for states and the involvement of various participants in the world community in the fight against them in the context of multistakeholding.